Date: Friday, August 13, 1999Time: 12:41 A.M.Location: Alley off Avenue C, Alphabet City, Manhattan
The child was not born to this world.
He was discarded into it.
No hospital wristband. No certificate. No waiting arms or whispered promises. Only a trash bag tied once and not well, a secondhand parka that stank of gasoline and mildew, and the hiss of steam from a cracked vent.
It was Friday the 13th. Somewhere, a bodega TV played a late-night horror rerun. In the alley: a payphone with its cord torn out, milk crates stacked like uneven stairs, a Batman mask face-down in a puddle.
Inside the bag, the newborn's chest fluttered and stalled, fluttered and stalled. His skin was the cold, waxy blue that scares nurses. His eyes—icy pale, unfocused—caught and lost the dim light. A dusting of blond hair clung to his skull, more color than weight.
A stray dog found him first. Its ribs showed through its hide. It circled the bundle, tore open the plastic with careful teeth, nosed back the parka, and curled along the baby's side. It licked his cheek once, as if marking him. The vent's warm breath did the rest, keeping his lungs moving.
Footsteps came later. A young woman in a man's overcoat paused at the alley's mouth. Winter cough in August. A hospital band's tan line on her wrist. She had been pregnant three weeks ago. She was not now. The dog's ears twitched toward her, but it didn't growl.
She knelt. The smell—plastic, parka, blood, city water—hit her and meant something it would never mean to anyone else. She pressed two fingers to the infant's sternum, felt the papery beat. She didn't reach for a phone. Hospitals asked questions. Shelters wanted names. She had neither.
Instead, she scooped the bundle under her coat. The dog fell in behind. The three slipped through a propped service door into the warm undercurrent of the city.
That was how he survived his first night: a vent, a dog, and a woman with nothing left to lose.
He did not remember any of it. But the cold stayed in him—buried, waiting.
1999–2005
He grew sideways through the cracks of Manhattan, underfoot and unseen.
The woman knew which doors stuck, which ladders were missing rungs, which maintenance corridors stayed dry. She held him under the coat when workers passed. "Shh," she whispered into his hair. "My treasure." She never gave a name. She never asked for his. Names made you visible.
They slept near warm pipes, woke to the rattle of trains. The dog hunted rats; the woman hunted timing—slipping into stock deliveries and out with bread heels, bruised fruit. The boy mimicked her hands, her patience. He learned to move when noise was loudest, to breathe when the city breathed.
He got sick often. A gut bug emptied him for days; the dog kept him warm. A winter chest cold nearly stopped his lungs; the woman turned his face into her palm and counted the seconds between pulls of air like prayers. She didn't teach him letters. She taught him how to vanish into walls and shadows.
After September 2001 the world above hardened—more police, more fences, more suspicion. She took him deeper. He learned keys on a belt by sound alone, shoes by echo, doors by the cough of their hinges.
By five he carried a burn scar where a steam pipe caught his arm. By six he watched a man stumble off a platform and die silently against the third rail. He didn't cry. Tears were loud. Loud things drew eyes. Eyes brought hands.
He had a face that didn't belong here—pale lashes, fine bones, glacier-blue eyes. Malnutrition blurred the beauty: dull gold hair hacked off with a box cutter, chipped teeth, body small and hunched. He moved on the balls of his feet, shoulders rounded, as if the air itself might swat him.
The woman died first. In a locked room she didn't wake from. The dog lay beside her a day longer, then didn't rise either. The boy covered them both with the old coat and walked away.
He had no word for grief. Only the shape of an empty place.
Time passed quickly and soon the date, december 25, 2006 came around. It was 11:58 P,M, within the service tunnel off the East River line, Lower Manhattan.
Cold pressed the city into its bones. Pipes ticked as metal cooled. The boy crouched behind a rusted valve, hugging his knees, shivering so hard he counted train vibrations just to keep his jaw from breaking teeth.
Hunger had a voice. Hollow, grinding, louder than the trains. It even had a smell—thin and smoky, like every meal was happening two rooms away and he was always locked outside.
He found a wrapper before he found anything else. Grease-spotted, half a hot dog long gone. Three rats argued over the smear in the dark. They were fat from other people's waste, arrogant in the way only survivors could be.
The biggest, torn ear and calm eyes, ruled the scrap.
He had always thought rats were kin. Clever. Quick. Fighting to stay alive in holes that were never made for them. He'd seen people roast them on wires, and he'd looked away.
Tonight, hunger ended the argument.
He had no knife. Only a length of iron pipe scavenged months ago, when someone had dragged a man behind a vending cage and cut him open for his jacket. Heavy for his hands, but it went where he told it.
A train screamed through the curve, pulling air out of the tunnel. He moved with the noise.
The rat's head lifted at the scuff of his shoe.
The pipe came down.
CRACK.
The body spasmed once. The other two scattered, tails lashing, claws scrabbling.
He froze with his fingers in the wet fur. Blood smelled close—warm metal on cold stone. And then—
A click. Not in the air. Inside his skull.
[SYSTEM]: Lifeform terminated.
Soul +1
[Balance: 1 Soul Point]
He stopped breathing. The tunnel breathed for him. Trains faded. Something else waited under the silence, like glass underfoot that had always been there, only now he noticed.
Me?
The answer was not sound. It was shape. A warmth curling into words, female in cadence, smoke-soft at the edges, not human and not trying to be.
Hello, little shadow.
Hunger has teeth. So do you.
A pale green rectangle overlaid the world. No glow, no music. Just function. Icons bloomed where words should have been: a figure in black hugging a wall, another in heavy armor, another crowned with light.
Rules. He knew rules. He'd lived by them his whole life: move when the noise is loudest, breathe with the wind, never be the only still thing in a room. This was the same, just drawn sharper.
His eyes went to the shadow.
[CLASS ASSIGNED: ROGUE — Level 1]
Skills: Stealth (Passive), Evasion (Active), Backstab (Active)
It was not fireworks. It was a key sliding home. His lungs steadied. His balance found center. His shoulders dipped without asking. His feet weighed less. A bottlecap clattered twenty feet downhill, and he knew exactly where it would stop without turning.
Another pane pressed against his thoughts, heavier.
[Bloodline Available — Tier 0]
GREENSKIN — FREE
Minor mutation likely. Behavioral drift possible.
He did not know the words. He knew the color green. He knew the promise free. He touched it.
Heat spread—no pain, only pressure, like hands along his spine. His pupils swelled; darkness backed up a step. Smells unwound into strands: copper blood on concrete, bleach bite in a seam, stale bread, warm fur, the clean knife of night air far above.
Something shifted in his bones: jaw aching faintly, knees wanting a crouch, fingers knowing the pipe without looking. Animals felt it first. The rats squealed and vanished. A pigeon burst out of a crossbeam, wings battering the dark.
He stared at the rat he had killed. Still warm. Still ugly. He didn't look away.
The voice returned, soft as breath:
Sacrifice brings reward. Small deaths, small gifts. Greater deaths…
greater treasures.
Another pane opened.
[SOUL STORE: UNLOCKED]
Balance: 1
Literacy insufficient. Icon mode enabled.
Pictures this time. Tin. Foil bar. Bread heel. No brands, just shapes and price tags.
1 SP = 1 dollar.
He thought food, and the Store pulsed. He touched the tin. It slid into his pocket warm. He ate. Heat filled him. He touched the bar. Sweetness detonated like firework light inside a hollow skull.
He learned his first rule without words:
You don't have to speak. Think, and it answers.
His second before the chocolate was gone:
Killing makes the number move. Numbers unlock more.
He wiped his nose on his sleeve, picked up the pipe again. The voice purred like smoke behind his teeth.
Earn. Spend. Learn.
The city kept breathing above him. Below, something new had opened its eyes.
He went back to work.
A train took the curve every eight minutes and drank the air out of the tunnel. He moved on those breaths—pipe low, body folded small, listening for claws before he saw fur.
Three more rats. One mouse. A pigeon that blundered down‑tunnel to escape something worse and found him instead.
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
He wasn't strong. He was correct. Weight on the balls of his feet. Shoulder closed. Strike on the off‑beat so sound hides it.
When he thought knife, the Store opened like a hand.
[Weapons] ▢ Rusty Shiv — 1
He bought it. The tape‑gummed handle slid into his palm from nowhere, already the shape his fingers had been saving. He wrapped the loose tape tighter. The metal had the taste of old iron and bad rain. It would do.
He asked without asking.
What else.
Pictures answered: tin, bar, bread, milk, socks, cap, gloves, tape. Each with a black number beside it. Nothing under 1 lived here. Candy was a bundle: five lollipops — 1.
Sweet tastes like now, the voice purred in the dark. Warm tastes like tomorrow.
He bought tape (1). He did not buy candy because unlike candy tape can be made to keep the wind out and clothes together.
December 26
He learned where to wait.
Above dumpsters, not beside. In stairwell shadows, not doorways. Along low vents that breathed warm bread and slept pigeons like drifting leaves.
Two rats on the grease line behind a takeout back door. He let them settle. Stepped when a bus sighed at the curb and the sound covered his feet. The shiv was quieter than the pipe—first touch, finish. He wiped the blade on the leg of his pants and did not look for a sink.
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
He bought socks (3). Thick enough to stop the skin from peeling when he ran. White in the picture, gray in his hands five minutes later, but warm. He pulled them on in a maintenance alcove and felt something close to relief. He rolled the tops down and tucked them under to make them harder to steal in his sleep.
December 27
A pigeon on a roof ledge where heat rolled from a vent and bread heels made a small drifting dune. He crept with the wind. He didn't grab the body—he grabbed the neck, clean and sure. Quick is mercy. Quick keeps guards from coming.
[+1 SP]
He bought a knit cap (2) because his ears hurt like glass under the wind and he was tired of hearing his teeth click.
Small death, small gift, the voice said, smoke‑soft, pleased without being kind. Keep going.
He did.
December 28
He learned routes. Rats follow smell; men follow noise. He followed neither. He timed himself to traffic, to sirens, to heels on wet steps, to the rush of steam valves yawning open.
Three rats along a drain lip that sang of bleach and pork fat. One mouse too bold for its holes.
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
He bought thin gloves (3) because the shiv handle bit when his hands were bare, and he was tired of leaving skin on cold metal. He flexed his fingers and felt the knife stop trying to escape him.
He tapped the Store again, because checking is how you stay alive.
[Progress uses Soul Points] Rogue L2 — 200 Greenskin L2 — 2,000
He didn't know the words but he knew distance. Two hundred was far. Two thousand was a mountain.
December 29
He hunted to eat, not to smile. He chose bread (2–3) over bar (1) because bread lasted longer in his mouth and made the shaking stop for more than an hour. He bought milk (2–3) only when the bones in his forearms felt like glass about to crack. He learned to eat like there were rules: tin, then bread. Never bread first; it turned his stomach to stones.
A rat that would have been a king if kings were measured by fat. He stepped when the train pulled the air. The blade went where breath lives. The body went still as if it had remembered a different plan for its night.
[+1 SP]
He saved. He didn't buy sweet again.
December 30
He made the shiv smarter.
He ran the edge along concrete until it felt less like a spoon and more like a promise. He wrapped a new layer of tape (1) around the grip, building a swell for his fingers. He practiced the reach from sleeve to hand until it was breath.
A sanitation crew clanged past a gate at the far end of the corridor. Boots, voices, the press of bigger lives through the metal. Evasion turned his bones to spark and set him three steps back before fear remembered it had a job.
He wasn't strong. He was quick to correct.
Two rats. One pigeon.
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
He stared at shoes (12–15) in the Store for a long time, fingers hooked in the knit cap like it might try to leave. He could tape his old sneakers another week. He closed the panel and bought bread (2–3) instead.
Need over want, the voice breathed, amused. You learn fast.
December 31 — afternoon
Cold made needles of the wind. He sat in a stairwell cup where heat licked up from a pipe seam and counted with his fingers, tapping each knuckle as if the bones were beads.
Eat today:tin (1) and bread (2–3) → two, maybe three rats.
Keep warm:socks (3) + cap (2) + gloves (3) + tape (1) → nine.
Shoes:twelve to fifteen.
Jacket:fifteen to twenty.
The numbers were not words. They were weights. He put them where breath lives and went to pay.
He hunted a pair of rats that owned a pitted stretch of tile like a border. He waited for a delivery truck to back‑up‑beep into an alley and stepped while the sound stuttered the air. One strike, then the other. No mess. No heroics. Quick. Clean.
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
He bought bread (2–3) and tin (1) and ate both pressed into the dark behind a rusted grate. The tin left a tang of fat and metal. The bread soaked it and became not good but enough.
December 31 — night
Fireworks kicked the sky open above the river. Colors tore and fell; the sound rolled like old thunder. He watched from behind a heat vent that smelled like stale flour and oven walls. People yelled in the cold as if yelling made life bigger.
He timed his body to the booms and took two pigeons out of the drift while the world stared up. He moved with the noise and the noise carried him.
[+1 SP]
[+1 SP]
He chewed bread and listened to the city breathe. The panel behind his eyes hovered like a far streetlight.
[Balance: ##] Shoes — 12–15 Jacket — 15–20 Rogue L2 — 200 Greenskin L2 — 2,000
He didn't know the names for them. He knew that pennies keep you alive and bills change your life. Vermin were pennies. Shoes and jackets were bills he could pay if he kept killing small. Those other two numbers—200, 2,000—those were bills he would need a different kind of death to afford.
He pulled the cap lower. He watched the light fizzle and die above the water. He kept his head down when laughter came around the stair cage, because laughter is attention and attention brings hands, and hands bring hurt.
Small gifts for small deaths, the voice hummed, pleased. Greater sacrifices… greater gifts.
He didn't answer. He thought of tomorrow and the next eight minutes when the train would yank the air out and make a pocket for him to move through, and the six places along his loop where rats forgot the world because grease smelled like better days, and the three roof vents where bread heels stuck in the grate.
He thought of shoes that didn't squeak and a jacket that didn't need tape and a bed that wasn't built of wire and cloth.
He counted the breaths between the last few fireworks and matched them, one for one, until the night went quiet enough to carry him home. The fireworks ran out of noise.
Smoke drifted off the river and thinned to nothing. The city's breath fell back to its old rhythm—truck brakes, sirens, heels on wet steps. He matched it, step for step, and carried his kills home. He ate bread and a tin and watched the panel behind his eyes hover like a far streetlight.
[SOUL STORE] Balance: ## Shoes — 12–15 Jacket — 15–20 Rogue L2 — 200 Greenskin L2 — 2,000
He didn't know the names. He knew weights. Vermin were pennies. Shoes and a jacket were bills he could pay if he kept killing small. Those other two numbers were a different kind of debt—the kind that needed a different kind of death. He pulled the cap lower and slept with the shiv inside his sleeve. He dreamed of a bed that wasn't wire and cloth and woke before the dream could ask the wrong questions.
January
He made a route out of hunger.
Morning: rooftops where vents blew warm flour breath and bread heels drifted like leaves. Midday: stairwells where heat licked through cracked seams. Night: drains that sang of bleach and pork fat, the borderlands where big rats ruled sloppily and little rats cheated and died.
He bought bread instead of sweet, milk when his forearms felt glassy, tape every time the roll thinned to paper. He pinned down the cheap warmth kit—socks, cap, thin gloves—and refused to buy anything that didn't keep him breathing. The Store never showed trash. Nothing cost less than one. He learned to save. One SP was one dollar. He could buy a life a dollar at a time if he kept taking more lives to stack the dollars up.
He checked shoes every night and closed the panel every night. Not yet.
The voice came and went like smoke under a door.
Pennies are practice. Bills are stories.
Need over want, little shadow. Buy warmth. Earn the rest.
He did. Two rats for food. A third if he needed tape. A fourth if luck handed him a slow pigeon on the vent ledge. He ran the shiv on concrete until it felt more like a choice than a scrap. He practiced sleeve‑to‑hand until it was breath, and when Evasion lit his bones, he let it move him before fear remembered to shout.
Twice he slipped past adults who wanted the coat he didn't have. Once he felt big hands change the air behind him and dropped flat before the hands knew they'd missed. He was still a boy, but his balance wasn't. Rogue sat in him like a key turned all the way, and Greenskin mapped the dark with smells he could follow with his eyes closed. The tunnel receded a step when he looked at it now; the world widened by inches in places that never moved for anyone.
He paid his bills.
[Purchase Confirmed] Shoes — 14
They arrived warm in his hands in a maintenance alcove, canvas and rubber, light and grippy and exactly the kind of ordinary he'd only stared at until now. He laced them badly, fixed it, and stood taller without changing height. He jogged the corridor once—quiet footfalls, no squeak, the world not hearing him go by.
Two nights later the city tried to take them back. Three older kids practiced courage on the wrong corner and he cut through the middle of their plan without touching any of it. Stealth was breath. Evasion tugged him left before a bottle had a chance to be a problem. He disappeared around the blind bend and held still long enough to hear their bravery wilt.
He didn't feel brave. He felt correct.
Late January
He saved for the jacket the way you count breaths to make the cold forget you're there.
Fifteen to twenty. That was fifteen to twenty nights when the trash line thinned and the cats got better at being cats and he got better at being the kind of thing that beats cats to meat. He never bought sweet now. He bought bread and tin and sometimes apple juice when cold sat in his stomach like a stone and wouldn't move. When his bones asked for help he bought milk and listened to them go quiet.
He checked the locked icon for Shelter and got the gray answer again. Not yet.
He rechecked Rogue L2 — 200 and Greenskin L2 — 2,000 and put them away. Not because he didn't want them. Because wanting doesn't move numbers.
The voice stroked the edge of thought like breath on skin.
Small gifts for small deaths. Greater sacrifices…
greater gifts.
He didn't ask what counted as greater. He already knew. He'd smelled it in stairwells where men slept and never woke and again in the way the Store brightened at bigger prices. Sacrifices were not fair. They were valued.
February
He paid the last of the jacket.
[Purchase Confirmed] Jacket — 18 Shirt — 3
The jacket arrived with the sound of a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. Relief is quiet when you've lived in noise. The cold backed up one step and stayed there. Under it, a shirt that didn't itch. He slept without shaking for the first time in a winter he could remember.
He tested what his body had become when no one was watching:
A drop from a low ledge to a narrow beam—no foot slap. A hang from a pipe until his forearms trembled—longer than before. A turn through a gap that had scraped him bloody as a smaller boy—no scrape now. His hands felt like tools he'd owned for years; his feet took corners like they'd learned the tunnel's math. He was not strong like stories. He was strong like someone who never wasted a step.
The panel hovered when he let it.
[SOUL STORE] Balance: ## Tools: ▢ tape ▢ lighter (2) Food: ▢ tin ▢ bread ▢ milk ▢ juice Gear: ▢ socks ▢ cap ▢ gloves ▢ (shoes ✓) ▢ (jacket ✓) Progress: Rogue L2 — 200 Greenskin L2 — 2,000
He shut it. He didn't need to stare at far numbers to know they were far.
He raised his head in a tunnel with old maps peeling off one wall and listened to a different sound—barrel‑fire crackle far away, bottle‑neck clink, a voice talking low to ghosts. He stood in the seam between want and need and counted the breaths between heartbeats until the sound faded.
Not yet.
He didn't have the words for what he wanted, only the math for how to get there. Shoes that didn't squeak. A jacket that didn't need tape. A place to sleep that wasn't a coil of cloth on wire. A number that could pay for different.
He carried his route in his bones. He kept to the edges because sight draws hurt and hurt travels in packs. He spoke to the System without speaking. It answered without showing itself.
And when he lay down with his hands tucked under his new jacket and the knife under his wrist, the voice visited like a smile you can hear.
You're learning, little shadow. Pennies feed you. Bills clothe you.
There's a story waiting when you're ready to pay for it.
He didn't smile back. He slept.
Above him, the city kept breathing. Below, the dark that had opened for him on Christmas night kept breathing too—slow, patient—like it knew what he would ask for next and was happy to wait until he asked it.